England captain Williamson blames England's poor defending on emotions

ZURICH :England captain Leah Williamson blamed emotions for her team's uncharacteristic performance in their 2-1 loss to France in their opening game of Women's Euro 2025 on Saturday, saying they failed to leave them in the dressing room before kickoff.

Marie-Antoinette Katoto and Sandy Baltimore struck in the first half for France to leave England's travelling fans in stunned silence and while Keira Walsh pulled one back in the 87th minute and the Lionesses had some near-misses towards the close, it was too little too late for the reigning champions.

"I'm disappointed there was some cheap sort of emotional defending in the first half, when you take waves of attack like that you leave yourself open to those sorts of things," Williamson said of their poor one-on-one defending.

"I'm just frustrated because I think the football that we played near the end, and the game plan, could've worked. We just didn't execute it exceptionally well.

"We spoke (at halftime) as players, we take responsibility individually and as a team. We have a calm environment at the minute but there was an injection of get the emotion out, leave it in the changing room, and go out and just be pragmatic about it and try and insert a bit of 'umph' into the game."

The loss was manager Sarina Wiegman's first in a European Championship after leading both the Netherlands (2017) and England (2022) to titles.

"Of course we're frustrated, we had three very good weeks and we trained really well but that's never a guarantee that you'll win the game," Wiegman said. "And you also know that France is a proper team too, so you have to do things really well. We just didn't get it right at those moments."

The first goal of the night almost went to England but Alessia